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He was standing– floating– still, the noise of jelletons becoming white noise in his ear. The ringing got louder along with the whirring as he stared at the spot where Goggles used to stand on, where he got sniped on the head for the umpteenth time.
“Yo kid! Move long, we need to get to spawn before they appear again!”
He didn’t hear Pearl, as he was too busy staring at some jelletons who were nibbing on an arm left behind from Goggles. Right next to that there was a piece of tentacle– Hachi’s tentacle.
He felt like vomiting. Even if he couldn’t.
“Kid? Kid!”
“Huh?”
“C’mon man, we need to move!”
“I’m– o-okay!”
She let out a sigh when she noticed his stammer, her tone glitchy.
“It’ll be fine kid, none of these things are real.”
Pearl had said that while they flew to the spawn, where Goggles and Hachi materialized again and continued the level laughing like nothing had happened. Like they weren’t just torn to bits a few seconds ago.
Because it’s not real. Pearl just said that.
It’s a simulation. You’re a fucking drone. Goggles and Hachi aren’t freezing in fear like you and they aren’t coddamn robots.
They’re the ones getting killed yet you are the one getting scared.
You’re supposed to look out for Goggles. Hachi is Pearl’s job, and yours is Goggles. You wouldn’t let him down, right?
Suck it up.
It’s not real.
So much of the floors felt exhausting but there was a specific level that Specs absolutely loathed.
A zone level. With difficulty listed as rigorous.
So basically, it was a nightmare.
For Goggles and Pearl it wasn’t hell to deal with because they were stupidly adrenaline-loving people, Hachi was a bit wary perhaps but he didn’t care much about it. For Specs though?
He hated it.
It was worse than the shit he went through when he was trying to find the rest of his team during the metro. It was overwhelming as hell, the constant jelletons swarming them from every direction possible, trying to protect two zones while swatting off those damned ink-spraying flying jelletons, not to mention the fucking snipers keeping spawning constantly and targeting Hachi and Goggles.
He was a drone, he couldn’t get hurt so he should be fine. Even if he felt like his sensors were gonna fry off due to the amount of jelletons he tried to keep away from Goggles while Pearl handled Hachi (thank cod for Pearl.) Not to mention Goggles was constantly going between platforms too, making it extremely hard to catch up with him.
He should be fine. He shouldn’t worry. He was the non-destructionable one. Goggles and Hachi were the ones who kept dying, losing all of their lives and having to start over again.
Countless times.
Yet they kept choosing that damn level.
They somehow passed, probably dying over…honestly, Specs just lost count at that point. He wanted to erase the whole level from his brain. Software? Hardware? Whatever it was.
He couldn’t do it, though.
Because that memory’s not real. The blood isn’t real. It never existed in your brain.
Nothing was real there.
Headphones, Bobble and Mitsuami told them that only somewhere around an hour passed while they were sleeping on the train. An hour passed in the real world, while they were there for months (probably. maybe years? days? it was hard to keep track of time there.)
And that specific level alone probably took a month. Who knew?
It was unbearable anyway.
Any part of the spire was a hell that he felt like they were never gonna get out from. They lost their lives on that damn level (and some other levels) too many times, running out of lives, having to restart the whole thing again, climbing it again and again and again–
…and Goggles wasn’t phased.
Because it wasn’t real. That’s why he isn’t phased.
You should be like him too.
They had returned to Inkopolis after a tournament. It had been months since the spire. Everybody was tired in the Blue apartment, to the point nobody would wake up even if fireworks lit next to their ears.
Except for him, though. He couldn’t sleep.
His brain was always full, usually. Always full of battle tactics, keeping his team in check, yadda yadda, but this time it was none of those things.
He wished it was one of those.
No, it was the damn spire. Again.
His hands gripped something on him, his eyes boring holes into above. He knew he was gripping his comforter, he knew he was staring at the ceiling, because the spire wasn’t real!
(But he was wrong.)
His fists gripping the empty air were absent. There was a whirring sound. Dead white coral around him. The little fish things were absent. He was off the white ground, he couldn’t feel his legs– he was a damn drone again.
…he wasn’t breathing.
He needed to breathe. He couldn’t breathe, fuck, he needed to breathe why couldn’t he REMEMBER to breathe–
He was a drone, he didn’t need to breathe, yet he desperately needed to. He felt another migraine coming in, he swore he saw smoke because his programming couldn’t comprehend two contradicting statements co-existing with one another.
There was a mess of garbled gibberish sounds coming out of his speaker, they were glitchy and they kept randomly getting cut off, as he felt a force pulling him to the ground no matter how hard he tried to fly up.
“...cs!”
Then he briefly heard a name, the force shifting violently, dragging his small drone form like the wind.
“...ECS WHAT ARE YOU DOING–”
He heard someone yelling, the force getting even more violent. It was now swinging him everywhere like a storm. He wanted to scream at it to stop, but he couldn’t speak because his speaker was jammed, not allowing any air to get through–
Everything went dark when a wall got into contact with him at a tornado’s speed, and the next second he felt himself getting hurled forward in a sitting position.
…sitting…on his bed. The dark– wasn’t the void, it was his room.
He slowly shifted his blurry gaze to his– hands.
He had his hands back. His arms, legs, head– his body was there, in its place.
Then the air. Going in and out of his nose.
He could breathe again. His hearts were beating at a rapid pace, he was– he was an inkling again. Not a drone with shattered plastic casing, not a hologram with orange triangles, but skin with an uncodly amount of freckles. He had flesh.
He was alive. And real.
His gaze slowly turned to a direction, then he noticed another inkling staring at him with wide and terrified eyes.
Goggles was holding his pillow, keeping it out of his reach, catching a quick glance at it as if it was a murder weapon.
Specs opened his mouth to say something, then met with dryness in his throat.
“...what happened?” He managed to say after a small cough, his tone was way more raspy than usual. The sentence was only two words, but they felt painful as if he swallowed knives.
As if he suffocated.
Goggles was also breathing heavily, his fingers letting out occasional jitters.
“What happened? What happened?!” He whisper-yelled, his voice desperate. “You tried to fucking choke yourself with your pillow Specs, what do you mean what the hell happened?!”
“...huh?” He was dumbfounded, not sure what he should be more confused at: Goggles’ panicked swearing or him apparently trying to suffocate himself.
“What were you thinking?!” Goggles dropped the pillow on the ground, still in a panic state. “How the fuck did you even do that anyway?!”
“I– I don’t know.” He managed to mutter while taking glances at his hands, in flesh, not drone propellers, not hologram bits. “I wasn’t…”
“You weren’t what?!” Goggles was genuinely spiraling, as Specs felt a strange sense of deja-vu.
Normally they would be reversed. Specs would be the one yelling, Goggles would be the other one.
But it wasn’t normal.
“I…wasn’t– myself,” he whispered, not being able to meet the other's gaze. “T-there was a force and I– I was a drone and the force just…kept throwing me around. Like a ragdoll.”
“...you–”
“I was in the spire. Again. Yeah.”
Goggles went silent, the only indicator from his previous spiraling being his declining rapid breathing rate. He looked at Specs for a full minute, then he dejectedly sat next to him in the bed with slumped shoulders while still staring at the void.
Specs knew that stare, so he just waited for him while picking at a stray thread sticking out of his quilt.
“...how was it?..”
“What?”
“The spire,” Goggles murmured. “How was it? For you?”
He crossed his legs to face the other inkling in the bed.
“Bad. It was bad.”
“Hm–”
“And before you say it wasn’t real, I-I know that but…but it did. It felt real.”
The metro was real. The spire was not. So why did he feel awful? Why did it feel so real? Why did he feel the suffocating air, the colorless world, the numbness, everything?
Why did he feel the blood– no, Goggles’ blood dripping and sliding off of his plastic drone casing if it was “just” a simulation? Why did he keep getting migraines as if a random jelleton was going to pop out of somewhere?
And why did Goggles seem so unphased?
…
…….
Was he really though?
Goggles was not really an idiot, found ironic by some. He could read how people felt very well. Too well.
He was also a hell of an actor. Maybe except for the few rare jitters of his fingers, it would be impossible to read his negative mood.
He was like this after the metro. It took him a good amount of time to actually open up and it took the entirety of Blue team to do that. Bobble mostly, for courtesy. Specs wished it didn’t happen at a very bad time like when Goggles broke Headphones’ mirror with a punch and scarred his hands even more.
Specs hoped it would make Goggles open up about his negative feelings more but it was already set up for failure because the spire didn’t shut, but sealed him away. And Specs feared it was impossible to get him back because he was alone this time, and Goggles made it very much harder to even take a glance at that side of him.
The earring was still there, on his ear, right under the chipped part. That alone proved the spire was real, even if it wasn’t. It still happened, and that little silver thing was proof.
The spire, combined with all the other stuff, made his shell even harder to crack. He had made them swear they won’t tell anything about his hands to Rider and Hachi after the punching mirrors-because-of-the-metro thing, and Specs was damn sure Goggles wouldn’t tell a smidge of anything to Hachi or anyone involved. They went through enough, he would’ve said.
Specs felt horrible. He wanted to hold Goggles, give him a good shake, tell him he was a living being too. That he was allowed to feel negative emotions. That he wouldn’t be a burden because of that.
He was the one who knew Goggles for years after all. He was supposed to be the one who knew him the best.
Yet here they were, he was doing nothing to comfort Goggles. On top of that he walked into his room seeing him trying to fucking kill himself by accident!
What a failure.
Specs snapped out of his thoughts when he felt a pair of arms around him.
Goggles was hugging him.
A bit too tight.
Like he was starved of any touch. (Then again he did hug people even tighter after the whole thing, after all. Another thing he didn’t notice. Great.)
He felt Goggles burying his head to his shoulder eventually, his hands were shaking as he whispered.
“Thank you for putting up with me for so long.”
…Specs felt like a failure.